


We'll Be Counting Stars

by southspinner



Series: Pulsar [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 23:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7408618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keith's just trying to navigate the collegiate mine-field of tests, social circles, and sleep-deprivation while still maintaining a fragile grip on his sanity. The last thing he needs is some snapback-clad fraternity president making him re-evaluate his entire existence, but of course, because the universe hates him, that's exactly what he gets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Be Counting Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I just... how I got here is a really long story, but all you fine folks need to know is that I once swore I'd never write a college AU. This is what the Gay Space Lions have reduced me to. Also, I have a full-fledged outline to expand this oneshot into a big, multi-chapter universe if y'all decide you like it and want more. Let me know what you think! 
> 
> So, yeah, here's my first contribution to the Voltron fandom, starring Broody English Major Keith and Celestial Fuckboy Lance. Enjoy.
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> EDIT: that big multi-chapter version of this? [IT HAPPENED. ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468749/chapters/16972980?view_adult=true)

Lance McClain is an astronomy major.

For a while, that’s all Keith knows of him, a curiosity born of too many PBR’s and a fleeting smile across the room at some frat party that Hunk drags him and Pidge to halfway through the fall semester. Hunk’s old roommate, Pidge slurs over the rim of a solo cup, is a junior and an astronomy major and some big deal in Beta Theta. And a jackass. Apparently.

Keith leaves it at that for a long time, that one silent smile refusing to be forgotten but stubbornly pushed to the back of his mind. Their school is small, and even though Keith’s overworked English major ass has no business or desire to be in the science buildings, he passes Lance McClain on his way to class sometimes. And it’s ridiculous, really, that his stupid brain won’t stop waxing poetic about what a walking contradiction a guy he’s never even talked to manages to be, lounging on the quad in basketball shorts and god-awful knee socks with sandals, his galaxy-patterned-snapback-clad head buried in Stephen Hawking’s latest publication.

It’s even more ridiculous that sometimes he’ll look up from his book as Keith passes, and he’ll smile, that same crooked grin from one of a thousand parties the Theta house sees in any given year. It’s nothing short of  _asinine_  that Keith lets those smiles make him trip over his own feet before he hurries off to the library with warm cheeks and his heart beating in his ears.

“You know that the world’s not going to implode if you like… talk to him, right?” Hunk tells him one day around a mouthful of chicken fajitas, catching Keith in the middle of a dumbstruck stare across the cafeteria and following his line of sight over to a bunch of Thetas huddled together at the only big table in the place that doesn’t wobble. Lance sits in the middle of everyone’s attention like it’s where he was born to be, laughing at something with a bright tenor voice that cuts over the rabble like a song.

Keith thinks that he might need to stop thinking about people in prose right before he chokes on his burger.

“I… you… Why would I want to give King Fuckboy over there the time of day?” he wheezes, slamming a fist into his own chest in attempts to dislodge the food stuck in his windpipe.

“Beats me.” Hunk shrugs, stealing one of Keith’s fries and flipping a page in his Engineering textbook. “He’s a massive nerd and a general pain in the neck, but I’m just getting kind of tired of you watching him like the sun shines out of his ass or something.”

“I do not!” Keith starts to protest, but Hunk and Pidge look up across the table at him and fix him with stereo deadpanned expressions that cow him into guilty silence.

Hunk shuts his book with a sigh, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “I guess if you want something done… hey, Lance!”

Keith has some trouble reconciling the part of him that’s fighting a valiant battle against shitting his pants with the part that’s dreaming up a thousand painful ways to kill Hunk, so much so that he’s still working through the short-circuits in his head by the time Lance McClain is lounging in the chair next to him, sharp features and a feline smile and a Nike tank top clinging loosely to bony shoulders and oh God. Oh God.

“Hey, what’s up?” says Lance.

“Hnnnnnnargh,” says Keith.

“Lance, you remember Keith, right?” Hunk asks, stomping hard on Keith’s foot under the table. The pain makes him pick his jaw up off the floor, but it doesn’t do much to distract him from the alarm bells shrieking in his head because  _how the fuck do you people?_

Lance grins, a flash of stunningly white teeth against tanned skin, nodding and reaching over to grab Keith’s hand in that bizarre frat-guy handshake that’s more of a crushing squeeze. “Yeah, from the rush week party. You were wearing the Zelda shirt and looked like someone brought you there at gunpoint.”

“I’m not a party person,” Keith grinds out, blinking like a confused, fluffy-headed owl staring at a goddamn Greek (haha. Because he’s in Beta Theta.) God and wishing for the sweet release of death.

“Yeah, rush week was pretty wild. Most of the stuff we have going on at the house on the weekends is way tamer,” Lance shrugs, fiddling with the drawstrings on his backpack. God, it’s like talking to an Abercrombie ad. “Mostly just beer and video games. Including Skyward Sword, if you’re up for it.”

Keith stumbles out of the caf like the prisoner from Plato’s allegorical cave, squinting at the bright sunlight and Lance McClain’s phone number scrawled across the napkin clutched in his hand.

Hunk and Pidge live to smirk knowingly another day.

* * *

 

Saturday night at the Theta house ends up being eerily quiet, all of the guys cleared out to head down the street for a mixer with their sister sorority. One in the morning gives way to Keith and Lance sitting in the blue glow of the TV screen on a sunken couch surrounded by empty beer cans, Keith cursing his way through the Temple of Time with an increasingly colorful vocabulary. After a few more minutes, he decides he’s too drunk to save Hyrule and chucks the Wiimote onto the coffee table, collapsing back into the worn cushions with a groan.

“Do they teach you to swear that poetically in the English department?” Lance snorts, polishing off whatever he’s been nursing in a plastic cup for the past half hour, this smirk pulling at his lips that’s half annoying and half hot.

“Call it an innate talent,” Keith snarks back, clicking through options on the remote until the Wii turns off and the TV settles on the Steelers game. “What about you? Astronomy, yeah? Doesn’t seem to fit, with you being, y’know…”

“A dumb frat boy?”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t have to,” he mutters, picking one of his textbooks off the coffee table and leafing through it. “I don’t know, dude. ‘I like space’ sounds like a fucking awful reason to pick a major but… I like space. It’s big, and beautiful, and it’s got a lot of possibilities. Plus, Astronomy’s got a lot of math. I like numbers better than words. No offense.”

“None taken,” says Keith, curling his knees up to his chest and trying not to spin turns of phrase about the particular brand of beautiful-sad that Lance McClain can be when he thinks no one’s looking. “I like words. Writing words. I mean… talking words doesn’t… I’m shit at communication. Being able to write it down or read it helps.”

“Opposite problem, bro,” Lance laughs, but it’s tired, as heavy as the dull thud of his book hitting the table when he tosses it down. “Dyslexia’s a bitch. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, and all my teachers always told me I’d be too dumb to do it. So I got smart out of pure spite. And here I am. I guess that’s why I picked Astronomy. How ‘bout you?”

“It’s kind of… I don’t know.” The weight of the alcohol tugging down at the tip of his tongue doesn’t make things any easier for Keith to articulate, but he fights it, scowling and huffing until the words do what he wants. “I want what you want. Big and beautiful and full of possibilities. But everything in my life’s always felt so  _small_ , y’know? Like, everywhere you turn, there’s a wall. You grow up in a world that feels small like that, and you start to feel like you’re small, too.”

Lance is quiet for a long time, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable, fading into the faint commentary of the game as the TV screen flickers a kaleidoscope of color across the sharp, freckled planes of his cheeks. Finally, he reaches down, casual, like he could be reaching for the remote and ended up with Keith’s hand in his instead.

Very quietly, very earnestly, he says, “I don’t think you could ever be small like that, Keith.”

“You don’t know me,” Keith answers.

“I’d like to.”

“You’re awful at flirting.”

“And you’re awful at lying,” Lance smirks, adjusting his snapback so that a few dark tendrils of hair slip out from underneath and fall across his forehead. His eyes are dark, so brown they’re almost night-sky black in the low lighting, and his lips wrap around that musical laughter to twist it into something more contemplative, a hum that’s half a whisper as he looks down and realizes that Keith hasn’t pulled his hand away yet. “And even if I don’t know you, I know space enough to know that everything’s a matter of perspective. To us, stars look tiny. But they’re some of the biggest things in the universe. We just don’t realize it because we don’t think about it that way.”

“I’m not a star,” Keith snorts, leaning forward to grab the Wiimote and take another crack at Zelda now that he’s sobered up a bit. “With lines like that, you sure you don’t want to take a stab at the English department?”

“I’ll leave the monologues to you, Boy Shakespeare.”

“Oh, fuck off. I’m totally J.D. Salinger.”

“Your author jokes are kinda wasted on the half-illiterate dude. Sorry.”

They both end up laughing until Lance’s frat brothers stumble through the door, and Keith walks back to his dorm feeling like there’s a nebula in his chest.

* * *

 

Hunk and Pidge are  _insufferable_  after Keith starts hanging out with Lance more, the both of them fixing him with shit-eating grins every time he blows them off to go meet Lance on his way out of the science building. Between Hunk giving him these infuriating knowing looks when he walks into Sociology late and Pidge making their shared dorm room uninhabitable with their constant prying and questions, it’s like they get off on meddling in other people’s business. Maybe it’s paranoia, but Keith swears he hears them giggling in the bushes one day when he and Lance are sitting out on the patio at Starbucks.

“So, basically, NASA’s been fucking  _killin’ it_  this year even though their funding got majorly cut, and that’s why astronauts are the ultimate badasses,” Lance finishes some long story packed with scientific jargon and frat-boy colloquialism, polishing off the last sip of his Monster and writing a problem on his Engineering homework down with a flourish.

“Uh huh,” Keith nods, fixated on his laptop.

“Are you even listening to me, bro?”

“Uh huh.”

“Keith cries after sex and wet the bed until he was fifteen; true or false?”

“Uh huh.”

He doesn’t look up until Lance’s laughter becomes too distracting, putting his coffee down with a scowl and flipping him off. “Hey, kiss my ass. I’ve gotta have this paper done in three days, and you can only analyze the symbolism of the color yellow in  _The Great Gatsby_  so many times before you start considering committing seppuku with a mechanical pencil.”

“Don’t even lie, you get off on that shit,” Lance quips.

“Fuck you!”

“You have a shirt that says ‘Ain’t no party like a Gatsby party because a Gatsby party don’t stop until at least two people are dead and everyone is disillusioned with the Jazz Age as a whole,’ Keith.”

Keith grumbles, but doesn’t argue. Lance grins, but doesn’t distract him. For a while.

“You should come run around with me tonight,” he mentions, and Keith almost misses it in the middle of a paragraph about yellow cars and the clever tactic of subtly demonizing affluence as the slippery slope to moral ruination.

“My paper—“ Keith whines, but Lance leans forward and shuts his laptop, so close that Keith can count the almost-invisible freckles smattered across the thin bridge of his nose, so close that he can smell faint whiffs of body spray. Keith forgets what he was protesting.

“I did something sweeping and symbolic, and I want you to witness it,” says Lance, hopping up from his chair and swinging his backpack up onto his shoulder. “I’ve gotta get to Physics before Shiro docks my grade for being late again. I’ll pick you up at nine, okay?”

Keith’s still a little off-balance by having someone so pretty in that close of a proximity, his slack jaw and slow nod earning another laugh.  Lance shuffles off to class backwards, making lewd jerking-off motions and moaning,  _“Oh, F. Scott Fitzwhatever, talk symbolic imagery to me!”_

Keith throws his empty coffee cup at Lance and yells at him to get his ass to class and stop talking about symbolic imagery like he knows what the fuck it means. Once Lance turns around and disappears off towards the science buildings, Keith smiles.

* * *

 

Lance drives a 90-something Mustang that’s seen better days, but the thing’s got a stereo system like something off of  _Pimp My Ride_ , the rusty body of the car rumbling with bass when he pulls up in front of Keith’s dorm at a little past nine, laying on the horn until Keith comes hopping out the door with one shoe on and his middle finger in the air. He won’t tell Keith where they’re going, just fixes him with a weasel-y grin that grows wider every time Keith asks until he eventually gives up and lapses into grumpy silence.

They drive off campus, out of town and down winding roads past the point where the streetlights illuminate the way, Lance’s headlights cutting a yellow trail through the inky darkness. The scenery gives way to moonlit farmhouses and orchards, gently sloping hills that rise and fall beneath the tires before Lance finally parks in an open field, yanking Keith’s door open and practically bouncing until he gets out of the car.

“You brought me out here to murder me and hide the body, didn’t you?” Keith deadpans, and Lance shakes his head with a manic smile, grabbing Keith by the wrist and hauling him across the field.

It’s like something out of a hokey teen romance movie, a fleece blanket spread out across the ground under a tree, a telescope so nice that its presence is frankly worrisome planted on the ground a few feet away.

“Did you steal that from the Astronomy department?” Keith gapes.

“I borrowed without asking or getting caught,” Lance shrugs, hauling Keith over to the instrument and yanking the lens caps off with practiced motions before bending over to squint into the eyepiece. He starts babbling again after a moment, preoccupied with pivoting the telescope on its mount. “So, you know that time we hung out, where you said you felt small and I told you that everything is a matter of perspective?”

“And I said I wasn’t a star, and it was all something metaphorical and sad and hopelessly John Green.”

“Author jokes ring hollow to the profoundly dyslexic kid once again, dude. Don’t know how many times I’ve gotta tell you that I don’t really read for enjoyment.”

And it’s ten kinds of stupid, really, that Keith stands there watching Lance making dumb faces as he squints into a telescope, drowning in a muscle shirt that’s too big for his lean, defined arms and shuffling his stupid galaxy Vans through the overgrown grass, and all he can think is that he’s the most beautiful thing in the entire universe. But he thinks it. And he feels it. He feels it in a sweet ache that sinks all the way into the center of his chest.

“Okay, got it!” Lance twists a knob to lock the telescope in place and pulls Keith down, pointing him towards the eyepiece and yammering on in his ear as he looks at the sparkling expanse above them. “So you see that really bright one in the center of your field of view? Go two stars up and one star over. It’s close to the edge. You see it?”

“Yeah?” Keith frowns, standing back up to shoot Lance a confused stare. “What—“

Lance shoves a piece of paper under his nose, grinning like a madman. “I bought it for you.”

“You… you what?” It’s so dark that Keith has to whip out the flashlight on his phone to read the paper, a certificate from the International Star Registry that states a long list of coordinates that have hereby been named ‘Keith’ by the deed-holder.

“So now you can never call yourself small again.” Lance is almost never serious, sticking to fleeting moments that disappear like a smile across a crowded party, but this one sticks, rings so powerfully in the hand pressed gently to the side of Keith’s face that his head spins with it, spins with  _him_. “You’re big and beautiful and full of possibilities. That’s why I love space. That’s why I-”

Keith pulls him down into a kiss that blazes like a supernova, and for the first time in a long time, he _feels_  it, feels like a star or a nebula or any of those things that Lance talks about in the glow of a TV screen on a Saturday night. He feels like there are galaxies underneath his skin, and that rush builds between his ribs, grows and expands and blooms in the place where their lips meet. And for once, Keith doesn’t have to write poems about something to understand it.

He whispers, “I think I might love you,” and Lance McClain whispers it back, and it’s the easiest thing in a whole big, beautiful universe of possibilities that he now holds.

 


End file.
